Odd this day

5 December 2008

This was the historic day the Facebook Republican Army was EXPOSED in the media in a SHOCKING story which APPALLED the respectable people of BRITAIN.

We’ll come to the FULL, SORDID DETAILS of the Times exposé later, but we must start at the beginning, which came a full… er, two days earlier in the Express:

The details are absolutely HORRIFIC:

Georgina Hobday’s £1million town house was ransacked by yobs.

Among the trouble-makers were a 20-strong gang called the Facebook Republican Army, who scour websites looking for teenage parties.

Yesterday Georgina’s mother, Sylvia, said: “It was an absolute horror show. I will never have a party for my daughter again.

“She had no idea who most of the people were and they were rampaging through the house.”

Sylvia, we are told, works in advertising, while her husband Michael is a professor at Sussex University. These are respectable, middle-class people, you understand, whose daughter goes to

£8,394-a-year Brighton and Hove High

They don’t deserve something like this. Unfortunately, their daughter advertised her party on Facebook, that den of iniquity, and soon

hundreds of gatecrashers forced their way into the house in Brighton and started wrecking it.

Sylvia said: “The garden has been ruined, the grass is just mud, people were walking through the pond and I was told one boy was trying to headbutt a mirror.

“Some people were climbing up the balcony and trying to get in through the windows. My floor was blackened with dirt and there were cigarette burns. People had taken out light bulbs and just stamped on them. They knocked over plants and smashed my garden shed.”

Police in 12 cars were eventually needed to disperse the mob spilling across the street.

It wasn’t the first time This Sort Of Thing had happened. Apparently, in March 2008, “drug-fuelled louts” caused a party to descend “into what was described as a Roman orgy”. Anyway, the day after this new incident, the Brighton Argus had heard directly from these absolute wrong ’uns. They were even putting their hands up to it — but not in a respectable, middle-class way, and showing the appropriate shame. No! They were revelling in their MISDEEDS. “Plumber Steve O’Brien, 25, said he and his brother Shaun, 24” told the paper:

We’re every parent’s worst nightmare

In this report, it transpires that the house trashed in March — home to “15-year-old Gemma Johnson” was also worth ONE MILLION POUNDS, and

More than £5,000 damage was caused and the family’s pet dog was left comatose after apparently swallowing ecstasy tablets.

Not only that, they were ROAMING THUGS:

He said: “We started off just going to parties that were local, but now we go all over the country. We all chipped in and bought a coach and we pay a bloke £500 to be our designated driver for the weekend so we can all get off our heads. One of the lads is a whizz on the computer and he finds all the parties. We just jump in the coach and turn up. Sometimes people invite us in and we have a good time. We don’t intend to cause trouble but it kicks off sometimes if they try to kick us out. If we’ve travelled 200 miles for a party we’re not going to just walk away.

I think we can all agree by now that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about this appalling MENACE TO SOCIETY. Thank heavens, then, that fearless, intrepid Tom Whipple of The Times, the nation’s newspaper of record, is about to enter the fray and unmask this SICK FILTH. (I am indebted to Mr W, who first wrote up this story on his Twitter account in the Olden Days (June last year), and is now somewhere much better.)

He had already uncovered another victim, a teenage girl called Rachel, who (according to a later Daily Mail piece)

hid in the bathroom having an understandable panic attack as the uninvited mob swelled the house to breaking point … stolen money and jewellery … furniture broken beyond repair … condoms littering the bedrooms

Perhaps the finest detail is that in an article dated 15 December 2012, Rachel apparently told her mother

There is, after all, nothing that screams ‘authentic 2012 teenager’ more than the use of both MySpace and the word ‘disco’. Another victim, Sarah, saw her ‘guests’ do “many thousands of pounds” worth of damage including “chandeliers destroyed” — so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I’m not sure she was living in an ‘average family-sized house’. (She also suffered the humiliation of having MySpace pictures of her dressed as a dominatrix splashed all over THE INTERWEBS.)

Anyway, enter stage left Tom Whipple, who picked up the phone, called these OUTRAGEOUS plumbers, and…

got their dad. “Right,” he said. “This stops.” They had never crashed parties, he said. They just found it funny to claim so. And teens found it convenient to blame them.

When Tom got through to the ‘ringleader’, Steve realised the game was up. He confessed that he had not been near any of these places, and was just having a laugh. For the teenagers, this appeared to be a case of

Steve and Shaun had seen the stories and decided to phone up newspapers claiming responsibility. Presumably that phrase, with its echoes of 1970s Northern Ireland, gave them the idea for the name of their ‘organisation’. Steve said his favourite bit of the story was a quote his brother had come up with:

“I saw one man having sex with three women on the washing machine. At about 2am I went into one of the bedrooms and saw two boys having sex.” When asked if he took part, he replied: “We all got involved”.

But when Tom spoke to him, he said of these claims:

“We had to use our imagination a fair bit.”

Shaun added that it was bullshit, and asked two pertinent questions which had not, it seems, occurred to anyone else:

Why would I want to drive all that way for a party?

and

I’m 24, why would I hang around with 15-year-olds?

Tom arranged a face-to-face interview with them, and hit the road to the latest victim’s house.

She answered the door. I voiced my suspicions — that they were a scapegoat. She admitted the truth. I said I’d come back when her parents were there.

But this was when the situation became… complicated, because.

by the time I got [back], another reporter had arrived with a cheque book and presumably enough money to pay for the damage. They wouldn’t talk to me. They gave an exclusive interview with a nice pretty photo shoot

Tom wrote up what he had:

…but it “didn’t get quite the same traction” as a story which came out the same day:

In other words, as Tom puts it:

money bought the story, not the truth.

The FRA, he says, “stopped talking to me too”, because, Steve said:

I am being offered a lot of money for the same bullshit tale.

Thus it was that the world heard Steve’s DISGUSTING story — basically, everything he’d told the Argus and others before, but with a distinctly Daily Mail slant:

Raised on a notorious council estate less than two miles from Georgie’s elegant residence, O’Brien is a hard-drinking, 25-year-old amateur boxer.

Yes, the Mailness of this story is on point throughout — especially when we get to the ‘victims’. “Talking frankly” to them in her “Grade II-listed four-storey home” (which the paper says is worth £1.5m — the passage of 24 hours and “£5,000 worth of damage” apparently having added £500,000 to its value) Sylvia said:

I knew Georgie was on Facebook, but I didn’t understand what that meant. People were also calling and texting their friends and sending messages via Bluetooth technology [a wireless messaging system popular with teenagers] across the city … That these people moved in so fast is terrifying. Had the party gone on for its planned course till 2am, the house would have been totally destroyed.

(Yes, the use of the phrase ‘Bluetooth technology’ is especially convincing in that sentence, is it not? It clearly came trippingly off her tongue exactly as transcribed.) Also:

The beautiful wooden floors have been soaked in alcohol and caked in mud and need re-sanding and re-varnishing. The kitchen lino is marked with cigarette burns and needs replacing. A window is broken, the lawn is a sea of mud and a fountain has been smashed to pieces.

Presumably, some of this was at least related in some way to ACTUAL EVENTS. One can imagine that the house was damaged, even if Steve et al were nowhere to be seen.

The moral of all this seems to be that, on those rare occasions when the truth manages to don its boots before a lie has had time to get halfway round the world, the lie still gets more attention.